Likely to Die (42 page)

 “Good hunting.”

 “Look, I’ll bring these with me. And I think I’ll swing by Minuit on my way home. I’ve got my ID with me so maybe someone from security can let me in Gemma’s office. That way I can examine her folders there before Spector gets on to us during the week.”

 “No. That’s a serious, emphatic, Battaglia-inspired capitalN, capitalO. There’s absolutely no way of knowing who’s around there on a Sunday afternoon and who you’re gonna bump into. Remember, we know we’ve got one loose cannon running around out of control. Who knows whether DuPre left anything at the hospital that he’s coming back for.”

 “Mercer, I can’t get in there on a Sunday unless someone from security opens the door for me. It’s not exactly a big risk to take in the middle of the day—”

 “No! Get it? First of all, a lady was killed in that room just a couple of weeks ago, remember? Second, we don’t know who to trust in that entire hospital, do we? Go directly home. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, and definitely do not stop at Minuit Medical College. Am I understood?”

 “What if Mike gets back and can meet me there?”

 “You really are stubborn, girl.”

 “I’ll be good, Mercer. See you later.” I didn’t want to lie to him and tell him I wouldn’t go to Mid-Manhattan. I was only a couple of blocks away and anxious to see what was in Dogen’s office now that I knew what to look for. I could always get the Police Department to secure her apartment by this evening so no one could get into it even if they had keys. But we’d have far less control over circumstances at the medical school if someone wanted to purge her files, unless we acted quickly.

 I gathered up the folders, turned off the radio, and walked across the room to put on my raincoat. April fifteenth was only ten days off and Coleman Harper was once again waiting for a decision about whether he would be admitted to the neurosurgical residency. I wondered how much of Dogen’s determination not to tell the Board at Minuit whether she was leaving was tied to the ten-year struggle she had waged to keep him out of the program. How desperate had he been to get in this time? And were there other candidates whom she had tracked and thwarted in exactly the same way? Gemma Dogen’s principles had made her a lot of enemies and I thought about how powerful a motive revenge could often be.

 I reached out to unlatch the chain on the back of the door. There was a flash of movement over my left shoulder that startled me and in the split second that my head whipped around to look for its source I was slammed against the wall into the corner where it met the door frame. A fist pounded into the rear of my skull, blinding me with its force and causing me to drop everything in my arms as I shrieked from pain. The second blow landed on the knuckles of my hands, which I had instinctively thrown up behind me to cover my head. Again my forehead crashed into the doorjamb as my arms flailed behind me, striking wildly at the body that was pressing in against my back.

 I braced myself against the wall and turned to confront my tormentor, hoping to reason with him when I looked him in the eye. But my feet slipped on the shiny tops of the dozens of folders that had dropped to the floor and spread across it like a giant-sized version of fifty-two pickup. My left leg slid out from underneath me as I pivoted and fell onto one knee, staring up to see Coleman Harper plowing his fist into the place on the wall where my face had just been.

 I screamed at him to stop but he pushed me onto my back and straddled me, one of my legs locked in place beneath me, as he pinned my shoulder to the floor and stuffed something that smelled like a dirty sock in my mouth to muffle my shouts. Harper’s eyes were darting madly around the room while he pressed his knee into my abdomen, holding my throat with his left hand and trying to keep both of my wrists in his right. It seemed as though he was searching for something to use as a weapon but hadn’t decided yet what it would be. I knew I could probably break loose of his hold but the pain was burning fiercely in my forehead and I was trying to conserve every ounce of my strength to counter whatever his next move would be.

 Likely to die.

 My mind was cartwheeling as I tried to figure some way to defend myself against whatever device he would turn on me. The only person who knew where to find me—Mercer Wallace—was hours away from here with no idea that I was in any danger. There would be no one to save me from Coleman Harper if I couldn’t do it myself.

 I watched his facial expression change as he looked from shelf to shelf mentally evaluating the deadliness of the objects his eyes passed over. I prayed he hadn’t seen the expensive set of kitchen knives I had noticed in the next room when Mercer and I first visited the apartment. Silently, I begged the neighbors to turn off their blaring television set instead of cluttering their home with more of that wretched-looking pottery that the salesman was offering. I wanted them to hear the struggle, which I knew was going to get worse.

 From my twisted position on the floor, I could see the coat closet Harper had secreted himself in before my arrival. It had been emptied out for delivery to the thrift shop, too, no doubt, and had given him an ideal place to hide while I searched the files and until I left. If only I hadn’t called Mercer to brag about my discovery. Maybe he would have let me walk right out the door.

 Stay calm, I tried to tell myself. He doesn’t have a weapon because he didn’t come here to kill people. He didn’t expect me or anyone else to be in Gemma’s home. It isn’t like the night he went to her office intending to pay her back for ruining the career he had wanted for himself.

 I closed my eyes and willed myself out of the apartment with all the faith in me, but I opened them again when the doctor spoke to me and I found I was still very much in the middle of this bad dream.

 “Get up.” His voice was sharp now, not quavering as it did the night I first spoke with him about Gemma’s death. He was standing and pulling me along with him, but the soft wool at the collar of my sweater wouldn’t keep his grip. It stretched and pulled out of shape and he grabbed at my hair instead.

 I was trying to spit the wool sock out of my mouth so that I could implore him to release me and get out of there but he pushed it farther in as he saw me attempt to cough it loose.

 He wasn’t taking me to the kitchen, I realized, which caused me a sigh of temporary relief. Images of Gemma’s mutilated corpse flashed through my mind and I was almost glad that he was pulling me in the direction of the window.

 Each of his hands was holding one of mine as he walked in back of me with my arms crossed behind me. We were near the corner of the desk when one of his hands released me and I saw him reach for the telephone. I knew he wasn’t planning to make a call. He wanted the cord to wrap around my neck.

 Likely to die.

 I waited until Harper stretched one arm across the width of the table to pull the phone wire out of the wall socket. Then I swiftly bent forward from the waist, kicking back my left leg as I moved, trying to hit his kneecap with the heel of my loafer. I must have come close to my mark as he shifted his weight and cursed when my foot made contact. It hadn’t unbalanced him as I had hoped and he turned back to me with a vengeance—and with the heavy telephone appliance swinging from the end of the liberated line.

 I had run out of prayers moments ago and I didn’t know how to whisper a more urgent one than those I’d been murmuring. I only knew that I didn’t want that length of cord wrapped around my slender neck. I had tried cases of ligature strangulation and knew what a slow, torturous manner of death it was.

 My head was facing away from Harper and I could only see his movements out of the corner of my eye. He was trying to free up the loose end of the long wire that had run from the base of the phone on the desktop to the floorboard outlet, and when he finally grasped it he looped it over the top of my thrashing head.

 Now I pulled my right hand out of his hold and reached it up to cover my throat. He let go of my left one as well while he worked to secure the cord around the middle of my windpipe and I struggled to sneak all of my fingers between his murder weapon and my crawling skin.

 Keep them in there, I lectured myself frantically. Don’t let that ligature tighten around your neck.

 I was rocking back and forth, kicking occasionally, tugging against the stricture of the cord while Coleman Harper looked for a place to anchor the body of the phone so he could pull its wire tighter around me.

 Again my brain was doing cartwheels. Random thoughts pushed themselves to the fore and I fought to get them out of sight. When my mother and father loomed in mental view, I shook my head more violently and tossed them away, not wanting them to visit this scene. Mercer and Mike were the people I wanted to see and to have save me.

 Harper was trying to pull me farther back from the bookshelf, so I tried to find something to cling to that would keep me in place, keep me apart from wherever he wanted to take me. I kept bringing up Chapman’s voice inside my head.

 Now I remembered what was familiar about this scene. I was almost giddy with thoughts of how Chapman would react to finding my body. I continued to twist against my captor, thinking how Grace Kelly had been attacked by the killer inDial M for Murder. I’d be strangled from behind, just like Kelly almost was, and Mike would be telling the uniformed guys how much he loved her in that movie—even as they bagged my corpse.

 The letter opener. I was fighting against Harper’s right hand, which was trying to pull one of my arms out from under the cord so he could finish off the job. My eyes scoured the top of Gemma’s desk for a letter opener or sharp pair of scissors but nothing was in sight. C’mon, kid, my voices were telling me. Grace Kelly did it. You can do it, too.

 Let him take one hand out, I thought to myself, grabbing onto my throat even more tightly with the other, to protect it. As he let go of my right one to use both of his to pull on the cord, I thrust my palm up against his face and scratched at the socket of his eye with my fingers. Again a howl and a spit at the side of my head.

 But I knew what I wanted now and I knew I would only need a few inches to get at it.

 I was gasping for air as he jerked on me harder this time. He could see the sweat that was dripping from my scalp, stinging my eyes, and hear my irregular intake of breath. My left side was facing him and I had leaned my entire upper body away from his as I pawed at the bookshelves for support. I had few things to be thankful for at that very moment, but the rigor of my exercise over the years was giving me an edge against his greater girth and strength.

 A sudden bend toward Harper, which surprised him, left me with several inches of play in the cord. With my left hand still guarding my neck, I pitched away from him and grabbed Gemma’s prize surgical award from its ebony stand on the third row of shelves. I whirled back with the gold-handled scalpel in my palm and ripped it across the wrist of the mad doctor. His blood spurted everywhere from whichever artery I had cut.

 The cord fell from his hand as I began to slash at him savagely. I let up only to pull the gag out of my mouth. I wanted to find a place to cripple him seriously enough for me to have time to get out of the room but I wasn’t sure I could find the right spot through his clothing. As he hunched over the desk, trying to wrap his own sleeve around his most serious wound, I stabbed at his upper thigh, digging the scalpel in it repeatedly. When he fell to the ground wailing, I ran to the door and unlocked it—as I had tried to do so many minutes ago—sprinting out this time and slamming it behind me.

 The twelfth-floor corridor echoed with my screams as I pounded on the few doors between Dogen’s apartment and the elevator. I could hear the peephole cover slide open behind the door of the nearly deaf neighbor and I realized what a sight I presented. Two lengths of black vinyl cord were wrapped around my neck while I held up the telephone machine that was hanging from one end of it to prevent the sheer weight of it from choking me to death. My yellow sweater was drenched in Harper’s blood and stretched out of shape so that it appeared to be coming off one of my shoulders completely.

 No sane New Yorker was going to let me into his or her home in that condition. All I really wanted to do anyway was get a police officer to respond. I began banging on the neighbor’s door. “Let me in,” I shouted. “I just killed a man. I’m crazy! I escaped from Stuyvesant last night and I came here to kill him. Let me in, NOW!”

 Exactly as I thought the little feet inside shuffled over to the telephone and whoever they were attached to dialed 911. Then she immediately called the doorman to complain about the madwoman who was ranting in the hallway outside her apartment. I kept the scalpel firmly in my hand and my eye on Gemma’s door, for the forty-seven seconds it took the superintendent to bring the service elevator up to the floor.

 I unwrapped the phone from around my neck while the two of us waited on the silent corridor for the police. The response time was less than seven minutes. I guess it was fortunate that Harper had tried to kill me on a quiet Sunday afternoon and not during a weekday rush hour. Three cars answered the call. Two cops stayed with me while the other four broke down the door to find Harper, who was unconscious on the floor of the apartment.

 “We gotta take you to be checked out and examined, Miss Cooper. What hospital you wanna go to?” one of the rookies asked me when I explained to him who I was.

 “After this investigation, I’m not sure there’s a medical center in this city where I’d be welcome. I’ve got a really great internist, though. If you guys could just take me home and do your interviews there, it’d be much less painful all around. You can look up a number for Dr. Schrem with Information and his service will beep him. I think maybe he’d make a house call in this situation.”

 The superintendent’s assistant had seen the cops arrive at the building and had followed upstairs with an old blanket. Police Officer Dick Nicastro wrapped it around my shoulders and took me down to the patrol car for the short ride home.